Stewardship Jobs in the Mups
We call our end-of-day classroom jobs stewardship jobs. Every day, before getting backpacks on and sitting on the rug to wait for dismissal, each student completes their weekly assigned stewardship job. Tasks include working with a partner to remove chairs from the classroom and stack them out front, erasing the whiteboard, making sure our classroom pet rats have fresh food and water, and putting away any books left out in our Mups library in the room between the two Mups classrooms.
It’s part of our classroom agreement to be stewards of our space. We developed a document at the beginning of the year as a tangible way to plainly show what we agree as a class are the most important things to remember about classroom values and conduct. We boiled it down to “Support each other’s learning. Be kind to each other. Take care of our space and each other.”
Expanding upon taking care of our space and each other, we looked around the room and sought to identify what needs taking care of in our classroom and would be reasonable to take on as a responsibility for students. We ended up with a slew of tasks and decidedly quirky names for them (see picture) that we carry out every single day before getting backpacks and congregating on the rug for dismissal.
Stewardship jobs are a longstanding practice at the Center School and are a through-line from Mups to Uppers. As a teacher, I can see the value of this practice across several dimensions. But what do students think?
Third-grader Theo says his favorite stewardship jobs are ‘Rattie Friends’ and ‘Sink Cleaner’. ”You get to see the rats and take care of them, which for me is cute.” As for ‘Sink Cleaner’ Theo remarks, “for some reason, that’s satisfying for me.” When asked if he thought stewardship jobs were important, he said, “yeah, cuz if we don’t have stewardship jobs it’s just gonna get messier and messier, stinky and dirty and no one will want to use [the classroom].”
Second-grader Ramona likes “Creeper” (floor sweeper) best because “you’re in charge of cleaning the room and it’s really satisfying to clean up all that dust.” Ramona agrees that if there weren’t stewardship jobs, “the room would be a total mess.”
A mess, indeed! These two testimonies illustrate the developing internalized sense of responsibility Mups have over the cleanliness of the classroom as well as the way it can be satisfying to fulfill this collective need. Our overarching intention is that through this daily activity, students learn to understand the value of community action. We all share the classroom, and when our classroom is taken care of, everyone benefits.
